In Collaboration with Fairhead Fine Art: Works on paper by Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso are presented alongside paintings by Ann Dowker, Andrew Graves, Humphrey Ocean RA, Sara Lee Roberts
100 YEARS - TRANSLATION AS INVENTION
It is often difficult to tell when a work of modern or contemporary art was made. A lithograph by Picasso can appear as immediate as a painting completed this year; a recent work can seem to answer one made decades earlier. Once chronology falls away, what remains is the language of the work itself.
100 Years: Translation as Invention brings together four modern masters, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, with four contemporary artists, Ann Dowker, Andrew Graves, Humphrey Ocean RA and Sara Lee Roberts, exploring painting as a continuous process of looking, translating and transforming.
Artists have always looked at what came before them. What passes between generations is not necessarily style, but ways of seeing, constructing and thinking through an image. Picasso, Matisse, Hockney and Bacon each transformed what they encountered into new visual languages rather than simply repeating what came before.
The contemporary artists extend this process in distinct ways, transforming landscape, the figure, art history, colour, light and everyday experience into new pictorial realities.
Across a hundred years, painting does not simply move forward. It returns, reworks and reinvents itself. The source may be another painting, a landscape, a remembered place, a human figure or the experience of light. What matters is what happens in the process of making.
100 Years: Translation as Invention invites us to look beyond chronology and recognise painting as a living language, continually renewed through the freedom to look again.
~ Vivienne Roberts
